What’s on TV Monday: ‘When We Rise’ and ‘Tickled’

Dustin Lance Black traverses half a century of the gay-rights movement in ABC’s “When We Rise.” “The Obama Years: The Power of Words” examines why many loved to hear the former president speak. And “Tickled” delves into the not-so-funny side of a seemingly wholesome diversion.

What’s on TV

WHEN WE RISE9 p.m. on ABC.Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Milk,” chronicles the gay-and-transgender-rights movement through the stories of three San Francisco idealists whose lives intersect across five decades. There’s Cleve Jones (Austin P. McKenzie as a young man, Guy Pearce as an older adult), who moves to the city from Arizona and conceives of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt; Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs, as the young Roma, and Mary-Louise Parker), who becomes a feminist organizer while pondering her sexuality; and Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors and Michael K. Williams), a Vietnam vet working in a military anti-racism program while hiding his own sexual orientation. Gus Van Sant directs this first installment of the four-part mini-series, which is bolder in concept than aesthetics. “As a television drama, it often plays like a high-minded, dutiful educational video,” James Poniewozik wrote in The New York Times. “But at its best moments, it’s also a timely statement that identity is not just an abstraction but a matter of family, livelihood, life and death.”

THE OBAMA YEARS: THE POWER OF WORDS8 p.m. on Smithsonian. Six benchmark speeches from former President Obama’s political career are dissected with insight from his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and chief strategist, David Axelrod; his speechwriters Jon Favreau and Cody Keenan; and Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia. Jesse Williams narrates.

AFRICA’S GREAT CIVILIZATIONS8 p.m. on PBS. Henry Louis Gates Jr. journeys to Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia and beyond in search of the origins of man and the rise of Christianity and Islam.

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A scene from the documentary “Tickled.”CreditHBO

TICKLED (2016) 10 p.m. on HBO, HBO Go and HBO Now. David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist with a penchant for the bizarre, knew he had a good story when he stumbled upon an online video for competitive endurance tickling, in which young hunks were tied to a bed with their clothes on and tickled — and paid by a company called Jane O’Brien Media. But then he and his co-director, Dylan Reeve, went in pursuit of the enigmatic Jane and were besieged by homophobic rants, private investigators and legal threats. Writing in The Times, Manohla Dargis called their documentary “terrifically entertaining.” Mr. Farrier and Mr. Reeve, she added, “see the humor, but they also see the pathos — because it’s all fun and giggles until someone gets hurt.” “The Tickle King,” a 20-minute follow-up to stream online following the premiere of “Tickled,” tries to get to the bottom of the not-so-funny business.

TAKEN10 p.m. on NBC. Luc Besson brings his “Taken” franchise to television and conjures up an origin story for its star. Clive Standen is Bryan Mills — the film role played by Liam Neeson — a former Green Beret who gets sucked into a career as a lethal C.I.A. operative after a personal tragedy sends him reeling.